Great NSW Stories

By Bill Marsh

Master storyteller Bill 'Swampy' Marsh travels our wide brown land collecting yarns and memories from the authentic voices of rural Australia. the people you will meet in these stories will touch your heart as Swampy brings to life all the drama and delight of life in the outback. By turns frightening, hilarious, wonderful, tragic and poignant, these tales are sure to get you in, hook, line and sinker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730498650

Bill Marsh

Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

Book preview

A Committed Team

I guess I should clear something up first. Initially it was John Flynn’s idea to provide a Mantle of Safety, as he called it, for those living in outback and remote areas. To do that he established the Australian Inland Mission [AIM], which was part of the Presbyterian Church, and that organisation set up outback hospitals and sent out trained nurses and Patrol Padres, of which my father, Fred McKay, was one.

So, the AIM, as it became known, was instrumental in opening up a lot of the outback hospitals, which were staffed by trained nurses, who were recruited and sent out for two-year stints. Then the Flying Doctor Service was, in a way, established to work in conjunction with those services that the AIM and other outback-care organisations had set up. And those nurses relied on the Flying Doctor Service very heavily. Like the Flying Doctor would come and conduct medical clinics and everyone would turn up to see the doctor and, of course, the RFDS was available for emergency services like evacuations and so forth, as well. And, of course, that’s developed on a very big scale now. So the AIM and the RFDS were both instigated by Flynn and, even though they were run as two separate organisations, they were inextricably linked.

John Flynn’s title was Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission and, though I was too young to remember him personally, I would’ve met him when I was an infant. Then, when he died at the end of 1951, Dad was appointed to take over. We were actually living in Brisbane at that stage so we shifted to Sydney, where the AIM’s Head Office was, and we moved into a home that had been provided by them for the Superintendent.

We’d been in Sydney for about a year and, I guess, things within the AIM were getting a bit rocky. There were financial difficulties and there were also problems within the Board. That’s no real secret there because it’s all been well documented. Of course, being only seven or something, I was too young to be aware of what was going on. But, apparently, it was getting to the point where the future of the Australian Inland Mission was in doubt so, when they were having difficulties getting staff at the Bush Mothers’ Hostel in Adelaide House, out at Alice Springs, Mum [Jean McKay] offered her services as Matron. And she offered to do that for gratis.

So, really, we’d just got established at school in Sydney and were beginning to make friends and then we were, sort of, uprooted to go out to live in Alice Springs. Adelaide House had originally been a hospital but then, when they built a new hospital in Alice Springs, the AIM took over Adelaide House and John Flynn redesigned it with the wide verandahs and the natural airconditioning system that uses the soil temperature underneath the building. That was quite revolutionary back then. So Adelaide House became what was called the Bush Mother’s Hostel and that was the place where mothers could come into Alice Springs before they had their babies at the local hospital. Then they could also convalesce there afterwards, before going back to their properties.

So, that was how we ended up in Alice Springs. I mean, we all thought it was a big adventure but, of course, Alice Springs wasn’t the town it is now. There were only about two or three thousand people living there back then and we lived in a small, square upstairs room in Adelaide House, which is in the main street, Todd Street.

At that stage there were three of us kids in the family; my brother, my elder sister and myself. So when Mum and Dad were there, it got pretty crammed at times with the five of us, all living together at the top of the building where we also had to deal with the extreme heat in the summer and the bitter cold of the winter. But, of course, Dad was still going backwards and forwards to Sydney. So it was basically just the four of us upstairs, with the outback ladies living downstairs and the other staff members. Jean Flynn was there for the first few months also.

Fred McKay’s plane naming with wife, Meg, and Barbara Ellis from RFDS Broken Hill — RFDS

But then, when they started building the John Flynn Church, on the vacant block next door, my father more or less returned to supervise that. So we watched the church being built, which was quite amazing because it also showed a lot of the Flying Doctor story. Out the front there’s the two wings, which symbolise a Flying Doctor plane. I mean, they really did an amazing job in designing and incorporating the entire story of John Flynn’s life and achievements into that building. So Dad was involved with the building of the church and I remember we had the architect staying with us a lot of the time, and what a very eccentric and funny man he was, too.

So we had two years in Alice Springs before we returned to Sydney. Then the following year, in 1956, the AIM started up a home in Adelaide at the seaside suburb of Grange, where outback children could come and stay while they were receiving specialist medical treatment. Once again, my mother offered her services as matron and my brother and I went to live with her in Adelaide, while my elder sister, who was doing her Leaving Certificate, stayed in Sydney.

I remember that as a difficult and emotional year for everybody because the family was, sort of, split in two. Dad was off everywhere, but mostly based in Sydney. Mum, my brother and I were in Adelaide and my eldest sister was boarding with the neighbours in Sydney. Then somewhere in amongst all that my youngest sister was born. So I got another sister, and then at the end of 1956 we returned to Sydney and we were based in Sydney from then on.

But Mum and Dad, they were a real team, and a very committed team. Mum wasn’t nursing after we came back from Adelaide but, instead, she was going around and speaking to a lot of women’s groups and other organisations. The term they gave it was ‘Deputation Work’. It was more or less publicising the work of the AIM in conjunction with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and, I guess, seeking donations and support and manpower and just keeping the work in the minds of, mainly, the church people. So she was quite busy with her speaking engagements and what not.

And Dad, well, as Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, he spent a lot of time travelling around to the various outposts visiting the nursing staff and the various developments that were happening. Later on he’d do a lot of flying — some of it with the RFDS — but in the earlier days he still drove. Sometimes he’d be away for anything up to a month or six weeks. So, we saw little of him and there were even Christmases when we never thought he’d make it back home.

I recall one particular Christmas when he was driving his truck, an International. We were living in the Sydney suburb of Northbridge then and from our front windows we could look out over the gully and see the traffic approaching. And I remember all us kids, full of excitement and anticipation, sitting at the windows watching and waiting for him to come home for Christmas.

So, yes, they were a very committed couple, especially to the work they were doing and, I think my father, sort of, missed out on the family a lot. But at every opportunity they’d try and make up for it. I mean, we never felt deprived or unloved or anything like that. It was just the area of service they were involved in. And of course, being kids we didn’t fully realise that we had to share our parents with a lot of other people and a very big space of country. So, yes, I guess, we felt that we didn’t have them around enough. And also, with Dad not being there that much, it must’ve been hard for my mother. But when we did have time together, they both made a special effort. Holiday times were very memorable. Oh, we did some really wonderful things together as a family then.

Then, of course, they passed away pretty close to each other. We’d all grown up and had left home by then. But Dad passed away quite suddenly in 2000. It was unexpected. Our mother’s health had been deteriorating for some time but, after Dad died, she sort of really went downhill. I think it was because they were such a team that, without him, she felt she really had very little more to offer. So she lost a lot of her sparkle, then she passed away in 2003.

A Drover’s Wife

I didn’t beat about the bush. I met the wife-to-be on the Saturday night and I asked her to marry me on the Sunday night. The only problem she could see about that was that I was still recovering from a tangle with a horse while I was out droving, and she reckoned we should wait until I got off my crutches.

But I just knew that there was something about her. And what’s more, I knew she didn’t want me for my money because she knew full well that I never had none. So that was in 1950, and it happened out at a place called Coolah, which is about a hundred and twenty or thirty mile north-east of Dubbo, there in central New South Wales.

Anyway, when I finally got off the crutches she still seemed keen on going through with it even though I was having a bit of trouble with the mother-in-law-to-be. I mean, we ended up good mates in the end but at that stage we weren’t. Anyhow, I hadn’t been home to see my folks in three years so naturally, they hadn’t met the wife-to-be so I said to her, ‘Do yer want’a meet my parents?’

‘Okay,’ she said.

Now my parents lived down south, down near the Victorian border, which was a long way away. So for the first stage of the journey we were all day and all night on the train until we got into Sydney at about five in the morning. Then with nothing better to do, when the shops were open, we got a taxi to drop us off up town so that we could have a look around. Anyway, we were walking past a Registry Office when I got this bright idea, see, so I very romantically said to the wife-to-be, ‘How’s about tying that figure eight knot that yer can’t undo with yer teeth, right here and now!’

‘Okay,’ she said.

But then, when we asked in at the Registry Office they said that one of us had to live in the district. Now, the-wife-soon-to-be, she’d been on a holiday, visiting relatives, in the area about three years beforehand so she give them that address. So that was all right.

The next problem was that we had to have two witnesses and, what’s more, they had to have known us for at least six months. That was a bit more difficult because we were in a bit of a rush and I was new to Sydney. Anyway, I was feeling a bit disappointed so we walked outside and three taxis were going past so I whistled one up and, oddly enough, the driver was the very same bloke that’d brought us up town. So I grabbed him and explained the situation and asked him if he wanted to be a witness at our wedding.

‘Okay,’ he said.

Then I said, ‘Thanks, and also can yer dig up a mate to be a second witness and be back up to the Registry Office at about three this arvo.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

So that was fine. Then we went to buy the ring. Now the only problem there was that I couldn’t spend over three quid because that’s all the money I had. So in the end we ended up having to go to three or four different jewellery shops before they had any sort of decent ring I could afford.

Then at about three, the taxi driver turned up with one of his mates. And when the feller at the Registry Office asked them how long they’d known us they said, ‘Oh, we’re old mates.’ ‘Known each other fer ages,’ they said, and that did the trick.

And what’s more, they turned out to be pretty nice fellers, too, because they gave us a quid each for a wedding present. That was good money in them days. So then we had a piece of cake and a coffee for a wedding breakfast and at seven o’clock that night we jumped on the train again. Then we spent that night on the train and we got to my parents’ place at about nine o’clock the next night.

Then after we got back from visiting my parents I took the wife back out droving with me. At that stage I was working with another chap and his wife — this was with sheep. The chap drove the truck and caravan, his wife did some cooking, and I had the horses and dogs.

But my wife, she turned out to be petrified of horses, just petrified. But she still helped out. She paid her way, all right. She’d get busy and she’d go ahead and help get the yards up and things like that for when I arrived with the sheep.

So that was that, and that’s how she became a drover’s wife. Then twenty-five years after that, I lost her. She died. But she done a good job to put up with me for that long, I reckon, so you could say that I had a honeymoon that lasted twenty-five years.

A Fine Romance

I left school when I was a young boy about fourteen and I picked up a bit of droving, working for different old drovers. That was around the Forbes area, in central New South Wales, and I also done a bit around other places in New South Wales, like Wagga, there in the south-west. Then about four or five years later I started out with my own plant, and then I come up to Queensland.

Well with me, my father was born in Mount Morgan, near Rockhampton, and he’d been a bushie. He used to love being in the bush and bushwalking and all that sort of thing. But I remembered his stories from back when I was a young girl and also I just never felt comfortable in the city. I just never fitted. Then about fifteen years ago, after I’d done a cookery course in Brisbane, I got offered a job as a station cook out at a merino stud in western Queensland. So I took the job because I thought it was somewhere to start and it’d give me a good look at the countryside.

So I started cooking there, but I didn’t like the manager and I didn’t like his wife. Then I met Bruce in town one night and he invited me to come out camp-cooking for him. So I guess that things between us just went from there.

At that time, I was mustering feral cattle on a property near a town called Wyandra, which is halfway between Charleville and Cunnamulla. There was me and several ringers. It was pretty dry then. So anyhow, me and Tess met. Then three brothers I knew, from up around Augathella, they put a mob of five thousand merino sheep together — that’s a good manageable mob — and they trucked them part-way down in two prime movers. Those were some of the first three-trailered prime movers. They had four decks on the first two trailers, then one double-decker. That was in 1988, when you had to have a special permit. So we left all our horses and stuff at Wyandra and we went up with a couple of motorbikes just to take the mob over.

Well, we actually only had one motorbike because we blew the other one up. That’s motorbikes for you. So we walked them back down, just the two of us. We had the caravan and the truck. I was the driver and I was also the cook.

But a lot of the time, when we’re out on the road, we share the cooking because I’m not a bad camp-oven cook, even if I do say so myself, even though the caravan’s all decked out with a stove and things. Anyway, we headed south on the Cunnamulla to Bourke road, heading down towards Barringun, which is just over the border into New South Wales. But before we got there we shore them at Owangowan Station on the Queensland – New South Wales border.

What happened was, the owners hired their shed out so we could get the sheep shorn and we got a two weeks’ breather while they were shearing. Well we thought that we’d get a breather anyway, but we let them go on the reserve while they were being shorn, then, boy, we had some fun, I can tell you.

See, we were following the Warrego River down because that’s where the feed was. But by the time we got to Owangowan there was only waterholes along the river so the sheep split up. There was four of us by then because we were rotating the sheep to the shearing shed and back. But then they had rain up where the Warrego starts and when the water came down, well, a lot of sheep got stuck in behind the channels so we had to go in and bring them onto the higher country. It was over belly deep in places and we had to swim a good few out. But we eventually done it.

Then at the end of shearing, we got a big five inch wash of storm which flooded us in. We couldn’t get in or out. So we were well and truly stuck and we’d just about run out of food. We didn’t have any bread and we only had enough flour to make a few dampers. So we ended up living on tinned braised steak and onions with rice. That really tested my cooking skills, trying to be creative with tinned braised steak and onions, I can tell you. Then finally, after a week or so, the owner of Owangowan got in with some fresh vegetables and meat and bread. And boy, was I glad to see him.

I mean, we couldn’t even get out to get a killer because the caravan was on one bit of a high sand-banky area and the sheep were over on another sandy area, and there was a big, flooded claypan between us.

We couldn’t even walk across it because our feet’d sink right up to our knees. It was all soupy. So we couldn’t even get over to kill one of the sheep for food.

Then when we finally got out we headed along the Widgeegoara Creek, on to the Cunnamulla to Bollon road. Then just before we got to Bollon the owners turned around and they decided to truck them home again because it’d rained up north so there was enough feed for them now, back on their home property.

And that trip was four and a half months. But the relationship from camp cook to wife just happened. We worked together for about six months and things just developed into a closer relationship. Then in late February ’89 the stock and station agents approached us about walking a mob of sheep to a property at Charleville. And boy, it was forty-five degrees in the shade and we had four thousand sheep, straight off their mothers.

I mean, it was an uphill battle right from the start. Being straight off their mothers they didn’t know how to walk, they didn’t know how to water properly, plus, they had pink-eye. Pink-eye’s like conjunctivitis. It’s contagious. All that’s got to happen is for just one of the infected sheep to rub its head against another one and the germs get across.

It’s caused by too much dust and grass seeds, and they get pussy and scabby eyes and it sends them blind.

So the pink-eye was raging through them. Anyhow we set out and it wasn’t too bad for the first couple of days, then they started going blind.

Then to make matters worse, I’d been away visiting friends that Christmas, down the coast, and I’d picked up gastroenteritis. So I was absolutely, horribly sick on this trip, working and trying to keep fluids down because it was so hot.

So we struggled on until mid March when we ended up behind floodwaters and we couldn’t continue on the stock route because there was too much water. So then we had to divert out and walk them around through private country. But they ended up being diseased, condemned and, naturally, the property owners didn’t want pink-eyed sheep going through their country so the sheep’s owners ended up trucking them out from there, back to their property near Charleville.

So that was the end of the job and I was still sick and so I ended up